High-Power Tapered Unstable-Resonator Laser Diode With a Fiber-Bragg-Grating Reflector

We designed a tapered unstable-resonator laser diode consisting of a 3-mm-long tapered amplifier and a fiber-Bragg-grating reflector, both of which were coupled with a biconical microlens at the fiber end. The amplifier was composed of an InGaAs single quantum well inside a waveguide, which had an optical confinement factor of 1.2%, a tapered current constriction of 6
^deg
in full angle, and an input width of 10 mum. The grating reflector was fabricated in a polarization-maintaining fiber with a reflectivity of 99% and a reflection bandwidth of 0.19 nm. A biconical microlens with vertical and horizontal radii of 3.5 and 11 mum, respectively, was fabricated at the fiber end to increase the coupling efficiency between the tapered amplifier and the grating reflector. An output power of 3.2 W was obtained at a wavelength of 1064 nm in multimode operation for the grating reflection bandwidth.